I added a new disaster to the game: Fire. It took longer than I anticipated but I'm quite pleased with the results.

Warning: Flashing lights. Gifs in this blog may not be suitable for those with photosensitive epilepsy.


When a fire type disaster occurs in Critias Empire, it will spread flames over a number of adjacent tiles based on the presence (or otherwise) of vegetation and how the land is being used (i.e. are there any buildings on the tile).

This makes vegetation in the game, like forests and scrubland have a greater meaning than just giving slight bonuses or penalties to production and build costs. As well, fires create a subtle risk to concentrating buildings together, which is in tension with clustering buildings to get bonuses. Conversely, unlike other disasters, the player can see the relative risk of a fire when building their empire without having to get their oracles to make predictions.


I also tidied up the temporary tile modifiers system in Critias Empire, adding an "ash" modifier that gives previously burned land a bonus to food production for a limited number of turns after a fire.

This might not sound like a big deal but i'll use it for a number of other disasters and features, so glad it's now in the game. A fair amount of code tidy up came along with that, especially with how disasters work, which again should make a good foundation for implementing future disasters.

There's still a few more things to do. I need to source some sound effects for one thing, and also add a setting to turn off lightning flashes for photosensitive players. Plus test everything works, especially save and load working, both with fire disasters, and also old save files made with earlier versions of the game not causing issues.


Even just getting to this point with fire disasters took me far longer than I anticipated. Around 3 and a half weeks, which combined with a trip to gamescom means it's now the start of September and I've still yet to implement the rest of the planned disasters. Some of which themselves will require some tricky reworking of existing code.

Probably, releasing by the end of September would be a very optimistic timeframe at this point. Nevertheless, the game's development has good momentum right now, so my plan is to press on with making the remaining disasters and Gods, then on to balancing the "main" game, as mentioned in previous blogs. I should at the very least have a new version of the demo released by this time next month.

In the meantime, if you have any criticism or feedback on the current demo, or have encountered any bugs, please drop a message in the feedback thread or grab my ear on whatever social media you see me lurking around. It's always helpful to hear your thoughts!

P.s. The cover image for this month's devlog is a crop of Hubert Robert's Fire in Rome painting. Hubert Robert is a big inspiration for the art of Critias Empire. His capriccio paintings are part of a movement that broadly romanticised ideas about the ancient greko-roman world through European art.

Festivals allow players to make medium-term tradeoffs, spending resources to throw celebrations and festivities, but with ongoing costs to match. Meanwhile, the game itself has been in a number of digital festivals on Steam.


There are various pre-defined Festivals in Critias Empire can be instituted by the player. Each festival runs for a fixed length of time and cannot be cancelled. Most festivals involve paying some resource every turn for the whole time the festival is running, in exchange for bonuses or other types of resources.

Players often end up with an excess of one resource that they can't easily or immediately do anything with. The idea behind festivals is to let players trade those resources in for something they want. But rather than a straight swap, the festival, and thus the costs and benefits, last for many years. In this time, the player's priorities might change or there might be a disaster for example. This means that there is a risk involved in starting a festival that may not be sustainable or become a drain on the player's resources.

I have finally implemented this feature after many years of having it planned, though I need to test and balance it before updating the demo to include it. Nevertheless, I'm really pleased with it, and I think it'll lead to many interesting medium-term decisions for players to make.


I've also added in a few more decisions. Even after having made myself some extra development tools for adding and editing decisions, the process of creating and balancing them is very long and involved. I'm hoping to add a further few more to the Glittering Isles scenario in time for the next update to the demo, but unfortunately the Bronze Seas scenario will remain disabled for the meanwhile as I try to churn out the decisions data for that also.


Since Critias Empire was in the TurnBasedThursday fest on Steam, as well as June 2025 NextFest, it has received a lot of new followers and wishlists, and even some people making youtube videos playing the demo, which is super encouraging!

The game will also be in Steam's 4X fest this week, alongside a number of other 4X games by indie developers. We even have our own group for promoting each other's games, and I highly recommend you check out the others if you're at all interested in different and innovative 4X and strategy games: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45670309


The festivals feature took me a bit longer than I anticipated, but largely due to me getting back into the flow of working after being on vacation in July. (Aide: I was in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, a fascinating part of the world that even had some ancient Greek ruins from the time of Alexander the Great and the successor states to his empire).

My aim is still to release Critias Empire by the end of September, but I will need to step up the speed to get there on time. My next aim is to implement all the remaining disasters and Gods that will be in the release version. I will share more details of those in the next update.

After that, I can focus on balancing the "main" game as opposed to the individual small scale scenarios that are currently in the demo. That will be the home straight and where I'll be looking out for assistance with feedback and testing. Follow the game here on Steam or stalk me on social media if you'd be interested in helping with that. Meantime any feedback and thoughts on the current demo is more than welcome, as it'll feed into my thinking about the balancing to come.